WHEN I was growing up, it wasn’t unusual to see under 16s surreptiously puffing away on a cigarette on a park bench, or in one of the shelters on Llandudno promenade.

I suppose I was one of the fortunate ones who never succumbed to the temptation. In fact I never felt the slightest inclination to smoke, and that was for a very good reason. Every morning when he gave me a lift to school in his car, my Dad would spend the entire short journey coughing and spluttering sometimes to the point of vomiting.

It wasn’t an edifying spectacle,and as he was only too well aware ,was entirely due to the fact that he was a heavily addicted smoker getting through between 30 and 40 cigarettes most days and paying the price with congestion in his throat and chest which each morning had to be cleared with the coughing that I found so distressing.

Time after time over the years he tried to give up. As a pharmacist he was only too well aware of the health risks, but such was his dependency on nicotine that each time, he was smoking again within a week or two.

Sadly, in the end, with a sort of horrific inevitability, he contracted an aggressive form of lung cancer and within a few weeks I’d lost an adored father, and my mother the rock on which she leaned.

So when I heard that cigarette packets in Wales could be sold in plain or standard packaging in the hope of discouraging the young from taking up smoking I was pleased.

Packaging, even though it didn’t influence my decision not to smoke one way or another, has I’m told some sort of allure for youngsters who are attracted to particular brands because they see their pop or film idols smoking them. And in my book anything that helps stop a youngster from taking up this pernicious habit has to be good.

Yes, it smacks of a nanny state, but with smoking being the biggest single preventable cause of ill health and premature death in Wales surely it’s worth a try?

For years cigarette packs have carried government health warnings but it seems to little effect. Successive governments have also increased tax on tobacco – again with little discernible effect on the statistics, which show that smoking accounts for 5,650 Welsh deaths each year.

I’ll never forget the day my Dad was diagnosed with lung cancer and was told it was untreatable. My first reaction was of anger because he was going to leave us far too soon, and I also knew this was almost certainly self inflicted.

To see this brave and intelligent man reduced to a shadow of his former self, and all because of an addiction to nicotine, is a heart break I carry with me always.